The Lost Get-Back Boogie

She took her arms away and slipped her panties down over her thighs, then stepped out of them. “Sit on the couch,” she said.

Her body was silhouetted like a soft white sculpture in the glow of light from the kitchen. I undressed and sat back on the couch, and then she moved over me. She moaned once in her woman’s fecund way, her eyes widened, and she spread her fingers across my back.

Then I felt it grow inside of me, too early and beyond any attempt at control, and when it burst away in that heart-twisting moment, she leaned forward and held my head to her breasts as she might a child’s.

In the morning we all had breakfast at the kitchen table, and the sky outside was blue and clear over the elm and maple trees, and the sun shone brightly through the window. The two boys were talking happily about a football game at school, and Beth turned the hashbrowns and eggs in the skillet as though she were fixing breakfast on any ordinary morning. But I could feel the tension in her whenever she looked toward me and Buddy at once. He was badly hung over, his hand shaking on his cigarette, the eyes puffed and dim and still focused inward on some barrel of snakes out of yesterday. His plate went cold in front of him, and finally he dropped his cigarette in his coffee and rested his forehead on the palm of his hand.

“Boy, I really got one this time,” he said.

I didn’t want to look at him, because I not only felt an awful guilt toward him but also that sense of primitive victory in making a cuckold out of a rival, particularly one who was coming apart while you had it all intact.

“Try some tomato juice,” Beth said.

“You got any ups? Or some of those diet pills will do it,” he said.

“Don’t t

ake anything else,” she said. He remained with his head in his palm and breathed irregularly.

“Do you have a hangover, Daddy?” the younger boy said.

Buddy got up from the table without answering and walked duckfooted to the icebox. He opened a can of beer and then began looking through the cabinets.

“Where the hell is that bottle of sherry you keep?” he said.

“Don’t do it, Buddy,” she said. “Just let it work out your system and you’ll be all right this afternoon.”

“Give me the sherry and don’t tell me how to survive the morning.”

She took the bottle from under the sink, and he poured a glass half full of it and then filled the rest with beer and broke two raw eggs into it. He sipped the glass slowly at the table, with his head bent over, holding the glass with both hands. Five minutes later the color began to come back into his face, and his hands stopped shaking.

“Man, that’s a little better,” he said. “That whiskey must have had shellac in it. I haven’t had an eggbeater in my head like that since I sniffed some transmission fluid in the joint.” He looked up at Beth, then shook his head. “OK, I know, wrong reference. But, man, somebody must have stuck an enema bag full of piss in my ear last night.”

That’s great, Buddy, I thought.

Beth told the boys to put on their coats and go outside.

“All right, all right, I got a speech defect about bad language,” he said. “But they hear all that shit at school. You don’t have to put earmuffs on them when they’re in the house.”

The table was silent, and Beth made a point of not looking directly at either one of us.

“How did I get upstairs last night? You must have dragged me up there by my heels.”

“You floated up there like a balloon,” I said.

“I feel like somebody worked me over with a slapjack. What did you do to me, partner?” He fixed one watery blue eye on me over his cigarette, and I flinched inside.

“I had to use force on you a little bit after you started taking off your clothes in the street. That wasn’t too bad in itself, but after you threw those flowerpots through the neighbor’s window, I had to do something to keep both of us out of the bag.”

His face tensed momentarily with hangover fear and disbelief. Then he drank from the sherry and beer and stared back hard at me with his cigarette between his lips.

“Son, you are a dirty bastard to put your hungover partner on like that,” he said, and I saw Beth’s hand relax on her coffee cup.

But I couldn’t quite forget his lingering, watery blue eye and the probe that it had made. Buddy had a way of knowing things that it was impossible for him to know, and I never was sure if the gift came from the fact that possibly he was crazy or if in his cynicism about human behavior he simply intuited, with a great deal of accuracy, what bad things some people would do in certain circumstances.

He finished the glass and took another beer from the icebox.

“Let’s get it down the road,” he said. “Didn’t you say the old man wants us to finish the fence line down to the slough?”